How cyber bullies can be caught out

We recently published an eBook on tracing a fake Facebook profile. It talks you through the process of how you capture information about the person who created the fake profile, and what to do with that information once you have captured it. The process explained in the eBook isn’t hypothetical and isn’t theory – it’s the exact process we use to trace the identity of a cyber bully on Facebook when we are asked to do it. The process works, and will work for you.

But why does it work? How can cyber bullies be found out when they’re the ones creating the fake accounts, and they’re the ones mastering social media for their own ends?

Simply put, your average cyber bully is so assured of their own invincibility that they’re unaware they can be caught out. We’ve seen it over and over again since the inception of social media. There are countless examples of people throwing around threats and abuse on Twitter, believing themselves to be safe behind the anonymity of their computer and phone screens, only to be identified, arrested and, in some cases, imprisoned for their actions.

The internet is not anonymous, regardless of what people think. Every time you connect to the internet at home you’re connecting with the IP address of your internet service provider. That IP address is then left as a tracer on every website you visit, such as Twitter, Facebook and other websites. That IP address can be used to identify you.

If you connect with your smartphone over Wi-Fi at home, it uses the same IP address. If you connect with your smartphone using 4G, it uses the IP address of your mobile operator and leaves that on the websites you access. It can all be traced by whoever has access to the website logs.

I have been running websites for well over 15 years, and have seen hundreds of examples of cyber bullying and trolling over that time on the websites and forums I have been responsible for. Even in the early 2000s, people would create fake profiles on forums to abuse other members – blissfully unaware that the IP address they used to create the fake profile was the same as the one used to create their real profile. Often, they’d make even more elementary mistakes such as setting their birthdate as the same as their real birthdate on the fake profile, or creating a fake email address that incorporated their real name.

Cyber bullies and trolls aren’t that smart, they only think they are. They’re also really not expecting you to try and catch them out. That’s why we were able to catch out a cyber bully who had created a fake Facebook profile using the processes in the eBook, and why it will also work for you.

The eBook can be downloaded today for £19 (instead of £79) when you use the discount code FAKEFB. Add the eBook to your basket and enter the code FAKEFB in the checkout.